Like many of you, I watched the Tracy Chapman / Luke Combs duet of Fast Car from the Grammys last night and was powerfully and unexpectedly moved. Also, like many of you, I remember vividly how that song — and that artist — stood out in the spring of 1988, when the radio was blasting INXS, George Michael, and Terence Trent D’arby in a never-ending, power-pop loop.

She was just so different. So human and real.

Tracy Chapman’s voice and talent felt — then, and again last night — like a marble-smooth boulder somehow preexisting the river itself. There was all this stuff — all these gated drum tracks, borderline erotic videos, pyrotechnics — and then, suddenly . . . a lady with a voice and an acoustic guitar. She shut us all up for a minute, sort of a collectively stunned silence of truly listening before, inevitably, we were back into the radio roll of Rick Astley, Poison, and Bobby Brown.

For all her understated, graceful humility, she left a deeper mark than those acts. One that made hearing her sing again last night more than a bit of nostalgia. It felt, instead, like an escape from temporality itself — a sudden relocation to a space of truth, beauty, and light.

For about ten years, from my teens into my twenties, I spent the night of December 21st at a cabin in the woods with John and Doc Colella, a son and a father, and two of the best friends I'll ever know. They’re both dead now, but I still think of them nearly every day, though as we pass through the solstice each year, they utterly fill my heart, my memory, my soul, and my interior sky.

Maybe John knew what we were doing the first years we went up, but I sure as hell didn’t. I just liked being invited. John was so brusque and cool, while his dad, Doc, was entirely different than anyone I’d ever met. To my mind, and in my experiences back then, compared to him, most people were like cookie-cutter patterns. Or perhaps, better, it was that he’d started with one shape, but it didn’t suit him, so he punched holes through walls and scraped chunks out of the level parts of himself until he was a wholly unique form.

I’ve been in the wilderness for a while, trying to find peace, perspective, and a path forward. I think I share that sense of dislocation with most of you. These are some deeply dark days.

That sense has led to a strong impulse toward flight. So, for the past month, I've fled - as far away from the present darkness as I could find, away from the political, religious, ethnic, sectarian, tribal, and even technological blinders of the present day. When I began to flee, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for or where I'd go, but I knew it was not here in the present moment of loss, agony, and pain.

I’ve lived much of my life this way. When confronted by a great fear or a situation I do not understand, I see which way the crowd is running, and I bolt the other way. That goes a long way to explaining why I live down here in Guatemala rather than near my family and friends back north.

Emmett Till would, and should, be celebrating his eighty-second birthday today - just a little older than my mom and dad, whom I'll be traveling to see very soon.

Till, visiting family from his home in Chicago, was murdered in the small town of Money, Mississippi, by folks who "take care of their own."

The purpose of the murder was vengeance against Till for having the temerity to exist and to breathe the same air as the very white, very upstanding, very small-town people of Money. It was also a warning to anyone else who looked like Till that they'd better not try that in a small town where people "take care of their own" and define "their own" in the most appalling of ways.

The Jason Aldean shit got stuck in my craw again today, and I was going to write something long and critical about how he DIDN’T grow up in a small town. He grew up in a majority Black city, Macon, Georgia, but CHOSE to attend a Christian school where the student body is STILL over 90% white in 2023. I was gonna write about how the town where he filmed his video, Columbia, Tennessee, is no longer a small town, but it WAS one in 1927 when Henry Choate was tied to the back of a car and dragged through the streets of that small town before being hanged right where Aldean CHOSE to stage his video.

I was gonna write about how the whole point of Sundown Towns across America was never having to SAY the words, “Get out by dark, N*****,” because that shit is IMPLIED by the militancy of statements like, “We protect our own round here,” when “our own,” are all fish-belly white and hair-trigger angry about them “outsiders from the city coming 'round here to do no good."

Just ask Ahmaud Arbery's people about that.

Country music wankstain Jason Aldean recently aired a video for his song "Try That in a Small Town" and outed himself as yet another in a seemingly endless line of pathetic, talentless, terrified racist white dudes with stylists and record contracts out of Nashville.

The song is a paean to violence against the upstart wokes, it's a hymn about the sacred, insular, hateful "ethic" of sundown towns in rural America where "outsiders" should fear for their lives if they don't like the way we do things around here.

Aside from the artist being a garbage-soul, "Try That in a Small Town" is also just an awful song of bad writing, canned phrasing, gaudy production, and ham-fisted tropes. It's a godawful mess, and I do not suggest you bother with it for one minute more.

Last night at Annie and Gus's weekly fam-dinner, we had a killer meal and watched the Season 2, Episode 6 of The Bear - and a few things struck me hard.

First: It's the best damn thing on television since Ted Lasso, and; second, it's the best companion show for Ted Lasso one could possibly imagine.

I know, I know, I know. At first blush, the shows couldn't be more different, but in some ways, they're the exact same narrative, just blown inside out. Both shows are about how trauma profoundly warps "normal" people all the time. Both shows have as their backdrop the pre-action suicide of someone who, by all visible measures - to their family and friends, anyway - had the world by the balls. In Ted Lasso, it was his dad, who we never meet. In The Bear, it's the older brother, Michael, who we just really met in the FUCKED-UP Christmas special we just watched last night.

I love the rainy season, but I miss the night sky.

Like many of you, I've been a stargazer most of my life. I think it's just in us. We're a narrative species. We draw meaning and sustenance from the world around us - the grand metaphors of being, and with the possible exception of the ocean, there has never been a more expansive template for contemplation than the night sky.

The daytime sky presents its answers forthrightly. The big yellow bastard up there gives us heat and light. It makes the flowers and the berries grow. It provides us with life. But the night sky is inherently more sublime. What's the point of it but to sleep, perchance, to dream?

Last night, I met a new friend for dinner, and as with nearly all met-a-new-friend-for-dinner-nights, it was a charming, lovely few hours with no real spark.

Most of my friends have soured on this sort of dating. I think it’s maybe a generational thing. At 56, I’m not opposed to a hook-up, but need more than an opportunity to move toward intimacy. I think that’s fairly common with age—or maybe I’m just old. Either way, the upshot is that I don’t go on dates looking to take someone home or be swept off my feet, and doing so with the expectation of some great reward of sex or love is, for me, something like randomly grabbing two jigsaw puzzle pieces and assuming they’ll fit. 

When that DOES happen, that’s great, but expecting two incredibly complex, sentient beings to click perfectly into one another over dinner seems a bit of a skylark.